1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to techniques for tagging images within computer systems. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and an apparatus that facilitates computer-assisted tagging of object instances within digital images.
2. Related Art
Unlike conventional film-based photographs, digital photographs can be loaded onto a computer system. This allows photographic management software to be used to organize, access and manipulate the photographs. In managing a collection of digital photographs, it is quite useful to assign tags to the photographs, to facilitate subsequent operations involving the photographs. For example, photographs can be tagged with the names of people that appear in the photographs to facilitate subsequent retrieval of photographs containing a specific person.
Unfortunately, in existing systems, users have to tag digital photographs manually. This involves going through the photographs one-at-a-time to explicitly assign tags to photographs. For example, the tags can identify the people present in the photograph or the location of the photograph. Note that tagging people in photographs is especially problematic because there are often multiple people in a given photograph. Consequently, there may be multiple tags for each photograph. This differs from location tags, wherein only a single location is typically associated with a given photograph.
Because the tag-assignment process is so time-consuming, very few people actually take the time to do it, even though tagging significantly enhances photograph management operations, such as searching.
Hence, what is needed is a method and an apparatus that facilitates tagging photographs without having to perform time-consuming manual tagging operations.